The American anthropologist Melville Jean Herskovits (1895-1963) is famous for his research on Africa and his pioneer studies in African American ethnology.

Melville Herskovits was born in Belefontaine, Ohio, on Sept. 10, 1895. He received his education at Columbia University. Later he founded the program of African studies at Northwestern University, where many of the first American African specialists were trained. When the African Studies Association was formed, he became its first president.

Herskovits is chiefly famous for his much-debated thesis that African American culture owes much to the African way of life, expressed in his Myth of the Negro Past (1941). The "myth" that he tried to destroy was that the ancestral cultures of blacks were primitive, with Africans making no contribution to the history of the world, and that under the slave regime of the antebellum South virtually all traces of African culture--except, perhaps, certain survivals in music and...